“echoed his remarks at recent campaign appearances and in stump speeches during the 2004 presidential election.” Media Matters has details.
Dueling Headlines
NYT misses the boat on General Richard Zimmer’s assessment of the Marine intelligence account of Anbar province. Read the story and it’s clear that General Zimmer is doing as much as he possibly can to signal agreement given the context.
Snow Defends Boehner: He Was ‘Asking Tough Questions’
On Tuesday, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) questioned whether his political opponents are “more interested in the rights of terrorists than protecting the American people.” During yesterday’s White House press conference, Tony Snow appeared to distance himself from Boehner’s remarks.
But this morning on ABC, Snow offered a lengthy defense of Boehner’s caustic remarks. Snow said that Boehner’s statement was “one of these hypotheticals” that raises the question “OK, what do you want to do for security?” According to Snow, Boehner’s remarks highlighted legitimate “issues.” Watch it:
[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/09/snowboehner.320.240.flv]
UPDATE: On CNN, Snow said that Boehner was “musing and he was asking tough questions.”
Transcript: Read more
The Sweet Taste of Straw
Here’s a good one. Leon Wieseltier takes on liberals who’ve been misinterpreting Reinhold Niebuhr and manages to offer quotations from zero lliberals who actually adhere to the misinterpretation that’s alleged at hand. Names of said liberals? No.
I mean, seriously, is there anybody out there who thinks that the problem with Bush’s foreign policy is that he has a bad domestic policy? Wieseltier’s quite right to term that an odd point of view to take up, and not a very sound reading of Neibuhr, but it’s such an odd point of view that nobody adheres to it. At any rate, I certainly grow tired of these incessant efforts to wield Brent Scowcroft as a bludgeon against liberal hawks’ liberal critics. To be sure, there were problems with Scowcroft’s approach to world affairs, to wit a seeming indifference to the suffering of foreigners. That said, when you see liberals say something nice about Scowcroft or Scowcroftish ideas they’re clearly talking about his ideas on a different subject, namely the inadvisability of launching unilateral preventative wars and the availability of alternative methods of coping with medium-sized hostile states.
All News Is Bad News
Obviously, it is the case that the folks tasked with trying to engineer a Democratic Senate were hoping to see Lincoln Chaffee lose his primary election, but it strikes me as a bit absurd to headline your Chaffee coverage “In Setback for Democrats, Incumbent Wins Republican Senate Primary” as if the main story in a Republican primary is the Democrats. The winner’s name somehow doesn’t even manage to make the headline. And so it goes with contemporary press coverage . . . essentially everything that happens in the world is, according to the press, a political win for the GOP and a setback for the Democrats.
In the real world, meanwhile, Chaffee’s position in the general election is hardly unassailable. If Harold Ford is really leading in Tennessee then you have to consider this a month wherein the Democratic outlook is quite good.
ThinkFast: September 13, 2006
Vice President Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pressured senators on detainee legislation yesterday, urging them “not to be too restrictive in setting legal limits on CIA interrogations of enemy combatants.”
Tom Noe, a rare-coin dealer and “GOP fund-raiser at the center of a scandal that has rocked Ohio’s Republican Party,” was sentenced to more than two years in prison Tuesday for illegally funneling about $45,000 to President Bush’s re-election campaign.
$68 billion: The trade deficit in July, a record level for a single month. “This year the overall deficit is running at $776bn, which, if met, would set a record for the fifth year in a row.”
NATO announced suicide bombings have killed 173 people in Afghanistan this year. “Most of Afghanistan’s surge in violence has taken place in volatile southern provinces, where some 8,000 NATO forces took military control from the U.S.-led coalition on Aug. 1.”
BP announced it had spilled 1,000 barrels of oil in Long Beach, California. “The spill comes as BP is fighting to restore its public image amid a series of stumbles — such as leaks and corrosion problems at its oil field in Alaska and its safety shortcomings at its refineries and alleged trading misdeeds.” Read more
Election!
Looks like frontrunner Adrian Fenty will be our new Mayor here in the District. Though he’d been in the lead for quite some time, Fenty was, of the two leading contenders, the candidate of change and change is in the works. I didn’t vote for him. My thinking, roughly, is that his reformist zeal is indicative of an unfortunate tendency to overestimate the possibilities of urban governance. The sad truth of the matter is that the most serious problems afflicting largish American cities like Washington simply aren’t things that local government can do very much about. Complacency about social justice questions is a bad thing, but it needs to be addressed at a fairly high level. Attempts to do it at the small-unit level are likely to be counterproductive.
Under the circumstances, I think the most useful thing DC government could use would be some fairly aggressive rollback of the business licensing process and various land use regulations aimed at protecting the interests of incumbent property owners. Since nobody was promising anything like that, the candidate of continuity and competence seemed like the correct choice. The District has a lot of problems, but things are getting better rather than worse, and that’s not nothing once you adopt an appropriate level of fatalism vis-a-vis the issues. On the other hand, this was not a line of thought I was totally thrilled with, so I can’t say I’m heartbroken Fenty won. Hopefully he’ll surprise me and aggressive reform will make everything awesome.
